“I Don’t Bluff”

Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council. He is finishing a book on President Eisenhower and the Middle East. He tweets @doranimated.

President Obama has repeatedly promised to do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. If there is no other choice, he says, he will resort to force. In a March 2012 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the president famously rejected the alternative policy, namely, allowing Iran to go nuclear and then trying to contain it. He emphasized the point dramatically: “[A]s president of the United States,” he said, “I don’t bluff.”

Really? Suppose this statement was just a show of toughness, timed to keep supporters of Israel on his side during the 2012 campaign season. Suppose that, when it came to Iran, in his heart of hearts, the president actually preferred a strategy of containment to a strategy of prevention. Suppose that was actually his policy aim from the outset—but, for obvious reasons, he couldn’t say so. How would he proceed?

He would proceed exactly as he has been proceeding—trumpeting his intention to roll back the Iranian nuclear program while actually avoiding confrontation at all costs.

To gain a sense of the president’s methods, consider first the saga of Syria’s use of chemical weapons that developed in 2013. Each time the situation called for a tough response, Obama telegraphed a punch—his famous “red line”—but then never actually delivered the blow.

The White House first realized that Bashar al-Assad had employed chemical weapons in the spring of last year. Its immediate reaction, however, was anything but a rush to enforce the president’s announced red line. On the contrary, it stalled for time. When the political pressure to respond became unbearable, the White House announced, in June, an intention to increase aid to the Syrian opposition. The president, it now seemed clear, was going to force Assad to pay a price for his barbarity. But the announcement soon revealed itself as a ploy to buy still further time, the diplomatic equivalent of “the check is in the mail.” The aid never arrived.

Then came the August 21, 2013 chemical attack that killed around 1,500 Syrian civilians. This time, the administration reacted quickly. Within days it appeared absolutely determined to punish Assad. Any doubts about its resolve were dispelled on August 30, when Secretary of State John Kerry stood before the television cameras and delivered a Churchillian speech justifying immediate missile strikes against the regime. But then, instead of ordering military action, the president decided to seek congressional authorization for the use of force, knowing full well that such a bill had little chance of passing. In short, he punted.

Call it the case of the vanishing reprisal. It is a pattern that reflects the president’s deep aversion toward U.S. involvement in open-ended conflict in the Middle East. His legacy, he has made abundantly clear, is to end such involvement. And just as that dictated doing nothing to stop Assad, it has dictated a posture of complacency toward Iran.

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Indeed, the failure—or, better, the refusal—to stand up to Assad in Syria was also a failure to contain the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their proxy, Hizballah. After all, these two actors did the most to turn the tide of the Syrian civil war. It was their direct intervention that broke the momentum of the insurgency and rescued the Assad regime from destruction.

Here, too, the same pattern is at work. Few have noticed the degree to which, in dealing with Iran’s aggressive behavior in the Middle East, Obama has broken ranks with his predecessors in the White House. For the last 35 years, every other American president has defined countering Iran’s malign influence as a vital American interest. To be sure, Obama still pays lip service to this traditional policy. “We are clear-eyed about Iran’s support for terrorist organizations like Hizballah, which threaten our allies,” he assured us again in this year’s State of the Union address. But the gap between word and deed has been glaring.

Recently, Obama went so far as to envision Iran as a constructive force in regional security. “[I]f we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” he told David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, “you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . [Sunni] Gulf states and [Shiite] Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

In poker terms, this would be known as a “tell,” a behavioral tic that inadvertently reveals a player’s bluff. In the case of Iran, as in the case of Syria, the president is looking for an exit.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the nuclear negotiations with Tehran that resulted in the interim deal reached in Geneva in November. Even strong supporters of the president’s policy are now publicly expressing doubts about that deal. Thus, Fareed Zakaria, the former managing editor of Foreign Affairs and former editor of Newsweek International, came away flabbergasted from an interview that he conducted for CNN with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. So impressed was Zakaria by the yawning gulf between the American and the Iranian positions that he called the interim deal “a train wreck.”

Even more startling is the skepticism of Dennis Ross, who, until late 2011, was a senior official in the Obama White House with responsibility for the greater Middle East. A study group recently chaired by Ross assessed the interim deal as so “deeply flawed” as to “undermine the effort to prevent a nuclear Iran.”

Obama himself has let it be known that he is not optimistic about the prospects of the next round of negotiations. In his interview with Remnick, he put the chance of success “at less than even.” These are low odds. But does that mean that the president has already worked up a tough Plan B? Is he preparing a response that will leave the Iranians in no doubt that they will be worse off if they fail to satisfy the minimum requirements of the United States and its partners? Or will we witness yet another instance of the vanishing reprisal?

The questions have already answered themselves. The outline of the real Plan B is fully visible in the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) that emerged from Geneva. Technically, that deal lasts six months, but it can be extended indefinitely by mutual consent. While the parties to the agreement express the “aim” of reaching a comprehensive agreement within a year, they are also careful not to commit themselves in any way. The deal, in other words, is less interim than interminable.

Obama’s surrogates are already telling us to expect a very long negotiation. “I think it’s extremely unlikely that it will be possible to reach a comprehensive agreement in the next six months,” says Gary Samore. He ought to know; until last year, he served as the top arms control official in the White House. Samore thus spoke with authority when he concluded: “We’re in for a rolling series of extensions.” In short: endless process, no endpoint.

And consider where we’re already at in this process. Despite claims to the contrary, the JPOA does not “dismantle” any part of the Iranian nuclear program. It pauses some aspects, while others proceed apace. A “research” loophole allows the Iranians to continue work on advanced centrifuges. In short, Iran gets to have it both ways: to enjoy sanctions relief (the West’s part of the deal) while continuing to build up its nuclear program (Iran’s part of the deal).

Much energy on the part of the White House has been invested in painting a contrary picture. We are assured that real progress has been made; we are even told that Iran has embarked on a historic reconciliation with the West. The president, even as he admits to doubts about the prospects of success, deftly encourages exaggerated hopes for the ongoing negotiations in order to seize the moral high ground from skeptics. The White House has even taken to branding its critics as warmongers seeking to sabotage the chances for peace. “If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be upfront with the American public and say so,” warned Bernadette Meehan, a White House staffer.

Thus the interim deal allows the president, too, to have it both ways. He makes concrete concessions to Iran in the present while promising get-tough policies in the future—at, that is, some very distant point in the future, which, as it draws nearer, will assuredly vanish in turn like a mirage in the desert.

“As I sat there,” writes former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his new memoir, “I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander [on the ground] . . . , doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Gates is describing a White House discussion about Afghanistan. But it might just as well have been about Iran—or, for that matter, Syria. The president doesn’t trust those who have traditionally managed the conflict with Iran, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the struggle to be his. He wants out.

Continuing to profess an unshakable resolve to roll back the Iranian nuclear program, the president has blunted every argument for a tougher policy and found plausible-sounding excuses to resist all calls for increased pressure on Tehran. While denying it vehemently, he has put the United States on a glide path to accepting a nuclear Iran—bluffing all the way.

_________________

Michael Doran, a senior fellow of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration. He is finishing a book on Eisenhower and the Middle East. He tweets @doranimated.

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The photograph of a tattooed pair of women’s legs appearing atop this column was e-mailed to me by a friend after having been sent to him by an acquaintance who’d taken it in New York. The legs—belonging, apparently, to a feministically inclined Jewish patriot—bear three inscriptions. On the left calf are “Never Again” and a barbed-wire Star of David. The left ankle (not pictured here) has two words in Hebrew or Yiddish that I can’t make out. On the right calf are the faces of two young women wearing military-style berets and lettering that, though a bit difficult to decipher, spells the Yiddish words dos lid geshribn iz mit blut, “the song is written with blood,” above the faces, and un nit blay, “and not lead,” beneath them. Or is it, on the contrary, un mit blay, “and with lead”? It’s hard to tell—and thereby hangs a tale.

The words of this tattoo come from the well-known song Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letztn veg, “Never say the road you’re on will be your last,” also known as the Partisans’ Song. Written in the Vilna ghetto in May 1943, it quickly became the anthem of anti-German Jewish partisan units all over Eastern Europe. After the war it was widely performed and recorded, and it continues to be sung in various languages at Holocaust commemorations and other events to this day. In its accepted version, the fourth of its five stanzas goes:

A more or less literal translation (there are several poetic ones) is:

This song is written with blood and not with lead,
It’s not a song sung by a bird that’s flying free,
The people singing it is ringed by falling walls,
And sings it with a pistol in its hands.

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The tattooer, it would seem, whether inadvertently or because given an erroneous version to copy, made a mistake in the stanza’s first line by omitting either mit, “with,” or nit, “not,” before blay, “lead.” In the first case, the line’s meaning would remain the same but its scansion would be harmed by losing a syllable, thus laming the last of its five beats. In the second case, the scansion would again suffer—and the line’s meaning would also be reversed.

And yet there would be, I must say, a logic in such a reversal, because the line in its accepted version doesn’t quite make sense. If you’re singing with a pistol in your hand, why say your song is sung only with blood and not also with the lead of bullets? Or is it possible that the lead referred to is not that of bullets but of the written word? Movable print, after all, was traditionally cast in lead, and the Yiddish word for a pencil is blayshtift, literally a “lead pin.”

The song’s lyricist, Hirsh Glik, did not survive to be asked these questions. A twenty-one-year-old Vilna poet at the time he wrote it, he was apparently killed by the Germans a year later (there were no actual witnesses to his death), in the summer of 1944. Taking the music from a song composed by the Jewish brothers Dmitry and Daniel Pokrass for the 1937 Soviet film Sons of Working People, Glik wrote Zog nit keynmol‘s words under the impact of the Warsaw ghetto revolt, which broke out in late April 1943. A similar revolt was being planned for the ghetto in Vilna, and according to Glik’s fellow Vilna Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, who later escaped to join a Jewish partisan unit, Glik was at the time “breathing an atmosphere of grenades and guns.”

This certainly suggests that the lead of stanza 4 is that of bullets. Indeed, there has always been reason to suspect that mit blut un nit mit blay may not have been Glik’s original words, because when Zog nit keymol was translated into its classic Hebrew version in 1946 by the poet Avraham Shlonsky, the stanza’s first line was rendered as Bi-khtav ha-dam ve-ha-oferet hu nikhtav, “It’s written in the script of blood and lead.” Was this what Glik actually wrote, which was subsequently changed? Or was it Shlonsky who changed Glik’s words for reasons of his own?

I now know the answer, supplied to me by the Yiddish scholar and literary critic Ruth Wisse, who needs no introduction to Mosaic‘s readers. Ruth was a close friend, until his death five years ago, of the great Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever—who, though not a native of Vilna, was in its ghetto, too, when Zog nit keynmol was written, after which he escaped with the same group as did Kazcerginski and fought together in the forests with him. In the course of our e-mail exchange, she wrote me: “According to Sutzkever, the line was originally written as Geshribn iz dos lid mit blut un blay, ‘blood and lead,’ not as it later came to be sung. He was quite insistent about this.”

Shlonsky’s translation, then, was accurate. But it’s more complicated than that, since after his escape from the ghetto, Sutzkever wrote a marvelous poem titled Di blayene plate fun Roms drukeray, “The Lead Plates at the Rom Press,” in which he describes, in preparation for an uprising, participating in melting down the lead letters of a Vilna printing establishment known for its elegant editions of the Talmud and recasting them as bullets. Part of the poem—in Yiddish the lines are metrical and rhymed—reads (in Neal Kozodoy’s translation):

Letter by melting letter the lead,
Liquefied bullets, gleamed with thoughts;
A verse from Babylon, a verse from Poland,
Seething, flowing into the one mold.
Now must Jewish grit, long concealed in words,
Detonate the world in a shot!

For Sutzkever, then, not only did Glik’s song speak of blood and lead, but the lead was that of bullets and printed words—or more precisely, of words turned into bullets. If Glik wrote Zog nit keynmol at the time the lead letters were being recast, he must have thought of it this way, too—but here the plot thickens once again. Although Sutzkever gave his poem the subscript “Vilna Ghetto, September 12, 1943,” which was the day of his escape to the forests, the Yiddish literary and cultural historian David Roskies writes in his book Against the Apocalypse that the poem was actually written in 1944 and that the melting-down of the letters never took place but was entirely a product of Sutzkever’s imagination. If that’s so, Glik may have been thinking only of bullets after all.

Why, when, and where were the song’s words altered to what they are today? Possibly, the instrumental figure was Paul Robeson, the pro-Communist African-American vocalist who was idolized in the 1940s and 1950s by the American and international left. Robeson sang Zog nit keynmol in both Yiddish and Russian to a large audience in Moscow in 1949 (this may have been the last time that Stalin’s regime permitted any public expression of pro-Jewish sentiment), and the Yiddish version he sang, as can clearly be heard in the recording made of it, had blut un nit mit blay, “with blood and not with lead.” Could he (or someone else) have changed the line to make it more palatable to the Soviet authorities by toning down its Jewish militancy, and could his version, due to his popularity, have supplanted the older one?

Perhaps. Yet one needn’t resort to conspiracy theories. The words of folksongs—and in effect this is what Zog nit keynmol has become—change all the time as they are sung and transmitted. I myself have more than once had the experience of looking up the lyrics of some folk song I sang when young, only to discover that the words differed considerably from the ones I remembered. Zog nit keynmol could have changed spontaneously in this way, too. It has changed again on the legs of our tattooed woman, possibly back toward its original version, although not in a way that can easily be sung to its melody.

Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council. He is finishing a book on President Eisenhower and the Middle East. He tweets @doranimated.

The nuclear deal with Iran is a wildly lopsided agreement. Whereas Iran received permanent concessions, the United States and its partners managed only to buy a little time. The agreement will delay the advent of a nuclear-capable Iran for about a decade—and much less than that should Tehran decide to cheat. Meanwhile, thanks to the deal, Iranian influence in the Middle East is set to grow. All of these benefits accrue to Iran without its ever having given any guarantee that it will change its revolutionary, expansionist, and brutal ways.

Why did the Obama administration accept such a deal? In trying to answer this question, some critics have claimed that the president and his negotiator, Secretary of State John Kerry, were simply no match for their opponents. The Iranians, so the argument goes, are master negotiators—they play chess while the Americans play checkers. “You guys have been bamboozled and the American people are going to pay for that,” Senator Jim Risch of Idaho told Kerry during recent hearings on the nuclear deal.

One sympathizes with the senator’s frustration, but his criticism is misplaced. The Iranians are not nearly so talented as claimed. While Foreign Minister Javad Zarif did exhibit skill in the negotiations, he also resorted to blatantly underhanded tactics that, opposite a different American team, would have rebounded against him. Zarif made concessions one day, only to revoke them the next; raised new issues at the eleventh hour; and blurred the lines of authority between himself and the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to the point where Kerry never knew for certain whether a deal could actually be cut.

These were the tactics of a used-car salesman, not a master statesman. If the White House had been so inclined, it could have invoked them as justifying a redoubling of the pressure on Iran. But the president and the secretary of state consciously rejected that path—and not for the first time.

In November 2013, the administration agreed to an interim deal that both granted Iran the right to enrich and accepted the idea that all restrictions on the Iranian program would be of limited duration. In so doing, the interim deal already incorporated the main lines of the comprehensive agreement that we see before us today. And long before November 2013—indeed, from the very beginning of his presidency—Obama has consistently dangled before the Iranians the prospect of gaining what they have most wanted: to become, in his words, “a successful regional power.” Toward that end, as he has stipulated on more than one occasion, the message he has sent to Tehran is that it would have more to gain by working with us than by defying us.

This is what many of Obama’s critics, including in Congress, have yet to absorb. When they suggest that the White House has been taken in, they tacitly assume that the president shares their goal of containing and rolling back Iran—an enemy power bent on ousting the United States from the Middle East and vanquishing America’s allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia foremost among them—but has somehow become confused about how best to achieve this. But he does not see Iran that way at all.

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In his news conference after the signing of the comprehensive agreement, Obama emphasized that the deal only “solves one particular problem”—that is, the nuclear issue. But he also expressed the hope that it would also “incentivize” the Iranians “to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative.” This gets to the heart of his approach, adumbrated again and again in his own statements and in those of his key advisers. Here is the president in a January 2014 interview in the New Yorker:

If we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran.

And here more recently is Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser for strategic communication: “We believe that a world in which there is a deal with Iran is much more likely to produce an evolution in Iranian behavior.”

In Obama’s eyes, containment is a fool’s errand, and continuing to treat Iran as a pariah will simply ensure that it will never help us damp down Middle Eastern turmoil. To him, therefore, the nuclear deal is not an end in itself; it is a means to the larger end of a strategic partnership that will conduce to his sought-for “equilibrium” in the Middle East. It is only because of the president’s awareness that the very idea of such a strategic partnership is anathema to a majority of the members of Congress, as it is to America’s allies in the Middle East, that he has pretended otherwise, framing the deal as a narrowly conceived and heavily qualified arms-control agreement that will in any case not affect America’s interest in countering Iranian mischief.

Of course, the agreement is no such thing, and Congress is right to be treating it with the utmost gravity. Much of the debate centers on technical questions—on whether the inspection regime is tight enough, the snap-back mechanism reliable enough, and the enrichment quotas restrictive enough. In addition to these far-from-trivial issues, critics also point to the havoc in increased Iranian aggressiveness that the deal promises to bring to the Middle East and elsewhere. By immediately channeling upward of $150 billion to Iranian coffers, it will inevitably contribute to funding the regime’s terror network. (Significantly, a cessation of Iran’s support for terror was not a condition of sanctions relief.) And as economic ties with Europe and Asia expand, and new avenues of diplomatic and military cooperation open up with Russia and China, Iran will become ever more confident and bellicose.

The White House has replied to the latter concerns by claiming that the regime will spend its windfall on butter, not guns. “They’re not going to be able to suddenly access all the funding that has been frozen all these years,” President Obama asserted in April—and besides, he added, “a lot of that [money] would have to be devoted to improving the lives of the people inside of Iran.”

Even to some advocates of the deal, the absurdity of this argument—when in the course of human history has getting $150 billion at the stroke of a pen ever convinced anyone to change his ways?—is too patent to be ignored. Thus, Nicholas Burns, a distinguished former diplomat and a staunch supporter of the nuclear agreement, has acknowledged its deficiency in this respect and has joined a growing chorus in proposing an antidote. “This is no time to help Iran augment its power in a violent and unstable region,” Burns has testified to Congress. “Instead, the U.S. should impose a containment strategy around Iran until it adopts a less assertive and destructive policy in the region.”

Unfortunately, Burns and others advancing this view are caught in the same contradiction as are Obama’s critics; inadvertently, both parties are reinforcing the fiction that Obama is truly interested in containing Iran. In fact, the White House has consistently displayed an aversion to countering Iran. Time and again, America’s allies in the Middle East have begged the president to help them curtail Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and time and again he has refused. His aspiration for equilibrium is instead based on the conviction that, thanks to his diplomacy, Iran will voluntarily come to place limits on its own ambitions. With that aspiration, the nuclear deal—an explicit recipe for strengthening all elements of Iranian power, political, military, and economic—is entirely compatible.

Indeed, even if Obama were to agree with the need for punitive measures to curb Iran’s “malign influence,” in the phrase of Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, the deal will vastly complicate any such project. One of the text’s more remarkable passages reads: “Iran has stated that if sanctions are reinstated in whole or in part, Iran will treat that as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this [agreement].” With this statement the Iranians have warned America that any action designed to weaken Iran will be met with nuclear blackmail.

If the Iranian nuclear program has been a knife held at America’s neck, the deal has, temporarily, moved the knife away by at most a few centimeters. To achieve this paltry, equivocal, and evanescent benefit, the deal has permanently ceded diplomatic leverage to Iran and nullified vigorous containment as a serious option. Anyone who claims otherwise has certainly been bamboozled—but not by the Iranians.

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Mark Glanville, a bass baritone, has performed with England’s Opera North, Scottish Opera, Lisbon Opera, New Israeli Opera, and on the recital stage, and is the author of The Goldberg Variations, a memoir.

Five years ago, I had never heard of Oria, let alone its Jews—even after a decade of regular sojourns in Puglia (Apulia), the southeastern province that occupies the heel of Italy’s boot. Traces of Greek, Carthaginian, Byzantine, Arabic, French, Norman, Spanish, Turkish, German, and even Gypsy culture: all these I had encountered. But I’d concluded that this remarkable region wasn’t a place where Jews had made much of an impression.

True, I knew the story of San Nicandro, some of whose inhabitants had converted to Judaism at the oddest time imaginable, just as Hitler had begun massacring communities all over Europe. True, too, remnants of an earlier Jewish population could be found at the functioning synagogue of Scolanova at Trani, in Puglia’s north. Descendants of 13th-century forced converts to Christianity under the Angevins, they had continued to practice their faith in secret until free to return openly to Judaism. But these days? Reveal your Jewish provenance to a Pugliese, and he’ll likely smile and say you’re the first Jew he’s ever met.

So when, answering an ad for a 17th-century country mansion (masseria), I parked for the first time outside one of the entrances to Oria’s medieval center and beheld in front of me a giant bronze menorah, I was astonished. But I shouldn’t have been. As a plaque on the wall announced, I was at the entrance to the Rione Giudea (Jewish quarter), and more specifically in the Piazza Shabettai Donnolo.

My real-estate agent enlightened me further: though the town had once hosted a significant community, there had been no Jewish presence in Oria for about a thousand years. Delighted to learn that I was a Jew myself, he drove me down the tiled central street of the old Jewish quarter, whose twisting alleys, blind passageways, and tiny lanes decorated with archways, portals, and steep stairways struck me as reminiscent of the ancient Middle East or North Africa.

As weeks passed, and negotiations for the masseria drew to a close, the agent put me in touch with an Orthodox British Jew named Graham Morris who recently had been visiting Oria on a regular basis, often escorting groups of American Jewish tourists around the town’s Jewish landmarks. In his first email to me, Graham remarked that he was fond of telling “the worthies in Oria that at the holiest hour of the holiest day of the year, several million Jews sing a hymn crafted in Oria a millennium ago!”

This got to me. As the regular High Holy Days cantor at a synagogue in central London, surely I had to be one of those millions. And indeed Graham’s “hymn” turned out to be Ezkerah Elohim, a piyyut (liturgical poem) composed by Amittai ben Shephatiah, who lived in Oria in the 10th century. In the Ashkenazi tradition, the hymn is recited during the final supplications of the Yom Kippur service, and I had been chanting it for twenty years.

I remember, oh God, and lament
When I see every city built on its foundations
And the City of God degraded to the nethermost pit.

The thought that a prayer of such importance had been written in this quiet, forgotten southern Italian town where I had just bought a home made me shiver.

Cantor Tzvi Weiss sings Leib Glantz’s setting of Ezkerah Elohim.

What had life actually been like in this beautiful town, set in an agricultural landscape dominated by olive groves and vineyards? Through Graham Morris I came to meet Giuseppe d’Amico, whose short book, La CommunitàEbraica Oritana e il suo Rione (“Oria’s Jewish Community and its Quarter”), provides as good an introduction as any to the subject. A septuagenarian teacher of classics who still entertains himself by writing Latin elegiacs and ancient Greek alcaics, d’Amico took me to the site of the Jewish cemetery, its tranquil charm marred only by a telecommunications tower visible for miles around. From here, he was able to point out the perimeter of the much larger medieval town in which the Jewish community once lived. Oria had been a city of considerable importance, and the Jewish cemetery was situated just outside it.

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D’Amico reeled off a few salient points of local history. Most notable was the black year of 925, when a Saracen army sacked the city, killing 6,000 of its men and taking 10,000 women and children prisoner. Among the dead were no fewer than ten rabbis, a figure itself suggestive of a sizable Jewish presence. Later, guided by d’Amico’s book, which is infused with the same passion as his speech, I gleaned a fuller portrait not only of the town and its Jews but of the rich Jewish history of Puglia itself.

Greek-speaking Jews had lived in Puglia since Roman times, and it was here that rabbinic scholarship gained its first foothold in Christian Europe. A medieval legend explains how talmudic erudition spread from its older center in Babylonia (Iraq) throughout the Mediterranean. It seems that four rabbis, having set sail from the port of Bari—Puglia’s largest city— were captured en route and sold into slavery at various locales. Ransomed by the local Jews, they proceeded to plant the seeds of Torah study in Tunisia, Egypt, and Spain. Ashkenazi Jews, too, trace their intellectual heritage to Puglia. Jacob ben Meir Tam, the great talmudist of 12th-century France, is said to have declared—playing on Isaiah 2:3—that “the Torah shall come forth from Bari, and the word of the Lord from Otranto.”

In this setting, Oria’s Jews exhibited their own brand of scholarly activity. Between the 9th and 11th centuries, in addition to numerous religious and mystical works, they produced important scientific and medical treatises, plus an important work of history (more on this below). Whether they were equally productive as farmers is uncertain, but an 11th-century manuscript copy of the Mishnah bears marginal annotations in the obscure and colorful dialect of southern Puglia, written in Hebrew script and referring almost entirely to agricultural terminology and procedures. “Mittene litame cannizza i vardezzona” (spread a wattle of dung and grass), says one, citing a technique for protecting trees from harmful insects. “Karmenatu in unu filatu intessutu” (carded, spun, and woven) says another, referring to the preparation of wool.

In Italy’s most fertile zone, were Oria’s Jews no less a people of the land than their neighbors? Oria’s chief product at the time was cloth, especially silk, and Mediterranean Jews, one scholar writes, were in general known “as planters of mulberry trees, breeders of silk-worms, weavers, and dyers of silk and purple fabrics. They carried the art into Sicily and became its chief promoters and artisans there. . . . From Sicily it was easily transmitted to Italy where it was developed with equal skill and enterprise.” It is thus quite possible that this was a trade in which the Jews of Oria also excelled and to which their wealth may be attributed.

To return to that work of history: through d’Amico I was introduced to the extraordinary Sefer Yuḥasin (“Book of Genealogies”) a hodgepodge of legend and chronicle written by a certain Aḥimaats ben Paltiel in 1053 and known also as “The Chronicle of Aḥimaats.” I saw a copy in the town’s library: an elegant edition with parallel Hebrew and Italian texts and commentary by Cesare Colafemmina, the subject’s foremost authority.

Sefer Yuḥasin (not to be confused with the later work of that name by Abraham Zacuto, 1452-ca.1515) was the first book to shed light on Jewish history during the period long dismissed as the “Dark Ages.” Surviving in a single manuscript copy, Aḥimaats’s book was rediscovered in 1869 in Toledo in a codex dating from the 14th or 15th century. Colafemmina believes it to be one of the Jewish texts stolen from the long-suffering Jews of the Roman ghetto and carried off on 38 carts one night in April 1753 by agents of the Vatican.

Its significance cannot be underestimated. Sefer Yuḥasin sets the southern Italian Jews of that period, as well as such important figures as Amittai ben Shephatiah, the author of Ezkerah Elohim, in their correct historical context. Basing themselves on Amittai’s mournful output, scholars had once placed him either close to the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE or, alternatively, at the end the 11th century (just after the First Crusade). Thanks to Sefer Yuḥasin, we now know that he wrote in the 9th century, in the wake of the brutal persecutions initiated throughout the Byzantine empire by the icon-worshipping emperor Basil I (867-886).

Of course, as a true historical source, Sefer Yuḥasin is unreliable. But it is highly readable and entertaining. Among its accounts of miracles wrought by wonder-working rabbis is the tale of Abu Aaron of Babylon (773-816), who visited Oria in the middle of the 9th century and found there “tents of study set up by rivers, planted and thriving like trees by the waters, schools established, rooted like cedars growing at the side of flowing streams.” Aḥimaats tells us how Abu Aaron restored to human form a boy who had been turned into a mule by an evil sorceress and bound to a millstone “to make him grind as long as he lived.” Another miracle, wrought by none other than Shephatiah, father of the poet Amittai, relates to the historically verified edicts of Basil I, in which Jews of Puglia who failed to convert were ordered to be crushed in an olive press.

“Basil had a daughter whom he loved as the apple of his eye,” Aḥimaats informs us. “An evil spirit tormented her. He could not find a cure for her. He spoke to Shephatiah in secret and with earnest entreaty said, ‘Help me, Shephatiah, and cure my daughter of her affliction,’ and Shephatiah answered, ‘With the help of the Almighty, I will surely do so.” Shephatiah then exorcised the spirit, stuck it in a leaden chest, and dropped it into the sea. When the delighted emperor invited Shephatiah to request a boon, the latter replied, “in sorrow and bitter weeping, ‘If thou, my lord, wouldst favor Shephatiah, let there be peace for those engaged in the study of the law. Do not force them to abandon the law of God, and do not crush them in sorrow and affliction.’”

Basil, infuriated by this request, which he perceived as spurning his offer, nonetheless issued an edict “commanding that no persecution take place in the city of Oria.” But Oria was to be the exception. For “then the wicked king continued to send emissaries into all the provinces and ordered his agents to fall upon [the Jews], to force them out of their religion and convert them to the errors and folly of his faith. The sun and moon were darkened for 25 years, until the day of his death. Cursed be his end.”

Though we also learn from Sefer Yuḥasin about the later, brutal incursions of the Saracens, responsible for the devastation of 925, it is the Byzantines for whom Aḥimaats reserves his ire—perhaps because, while the Saracens targeted all of the citizens of Oria, irrespective of religion, Basil’s legislation was rooted specifically in anti-Semitism.

The strangest aspect of Sefer Yuḥasin is not what is written in it, but what is left out. The chronicle contains no mention of Oria’s greatest son, Shabbetai Donnolo, whose name graces not only the square where I first became aware of the Jews of Oria but also a street and a hospital in Tel Aviv. Why a hospital? Donnolo’s milestone work, Sefer ha-Mirkaḥot (“Book of Mixtures”), was the first medical text to be written in Italy after the fall of the Roman empire and the oldest Hebrew medical text in Europe. It also makes generous use of non-Jewish sources. (Could this have struck the ever-proud Aḥimaats as an unforgivable transgression?) Donnolo was also an accomplished poet, the author of an important work on astronomy and astrology, and the coiner of many Hebrew words and phrases still in use today.

While Aḥimaats’s anger is stirred by the Byzantines, Donnolo’s own bitterness was quickened by the Saracens who in 925 destroyed his community and sold him into slavery. It is he, I realized when I came to read Andrew Sharf’s The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo, who detailed the atrocities committed by the Arabs in that fateful year, not least among them the murder of the ten rabbis.

What would Shabbetai Donnolo have thought had he known that Arabs were to return to Oria a thousand years later in rather different circumstances? I had arranged to meet Giuseppe d’Amico just outside the old Jewish quarter where I would be translating his reconstruction of local Jewish history for the benefit of a group of 80 Anglophone Jewish tourists who had come to Puglia to celebrate Passover. D’Amico began by repeating Donnolo’s bitter threnody on the events of 925, and I thought I detected a contemporary overtone in his words.

To an outsider, Oria’s streets may have seemed calm, but its citizens were uneasy. At the town’s corners and cafes, young men from Tunisia—home territory of the Saracens who had ravaged the town a millennium earlier—were congregating every day. They were refugees who, after arriving by boat in the wake of the 2011-12 Arab Spring, had been sent to a holding camp halfway between Oria and Manduria, five miles away. Indeed, our group had been advised to take a detour to our next stop, a tiny 16th-century synagogue, lest we bump into any of these Arab youths as they drifted aimlessly about, warned by notices in their language not to linger at café tables for longer than fifteen minutes.

In Manduria itself, a contingent of military police was on hand to prevent any local outbreak of violence. But this was gratuitous; most of the Tunisians were waiting in the camp, hoping to receive permission to leave an area where they had no prospect of employment and head instead for relatives in France. Quite a few had already done so after a mass breakout from a former World War II U.S. airbase. Meanwhile, some had harmed themselves protesting their internment; one had set himself alight, another was killed on the road. Thus did the latest Arab invasion of Oria and its environs bespeak both tragedy and farce.

As for the Jews, in their old quarter one can see the only freestanding building in the town’s historic center. What looks like a rather unprepossessing, whitewashed, modern family home, d’Amico believes was once a synagogue. “My grandparents used to circle its walls at times of illness in the belief they would be cured,” he told our party. “The Jews of Oria were famous doctors and pharmacists, so it makes sense. They brought light to this town at a time when the rest of Italy was darkened by barbarian invasions.”

Most modern Oritani share d’Amico’s pride in their town’s Jewish heritage. Each September, a festive conference is held in the city and papers are read to mark the ancient Jewish presence there. But it would be naïve to infer from such nostalgic philo-Semitism that the town holds contemporary Jews in equal esteem. Following Israel’s incursion into Gaza last year, I was privy to the following exchange on Facebook between two Oritani, one of whom had “friended” me on the site:

A: What’s the matter with those awful people? You’d think after what happened to them [in the Holocaust], they’d have learned!

B: It’s a shame [the Nazis] didn’t finish the job and wipe that filth off the face of the earth.

I have never met the authors of these words, and I hope I never will. I also firmly believe that none of my own Oritano friends and acquaintances shares these all-too-frequently expressed sentiments of our historical moment. Still, even as I continue to enjoy my own privileged status as the first Jew to return to Oria after a thousand years, I am mindful of a fact that one should never lose sight of: it is as easy to idealize dead Jews as it is to demonize living ones.

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Were Reuben and Gad Right to Ask Moses for Land on the Other Side of the Jordan?

Atar Hadari, born in Israel and raised in England, is a poet and translator whose Rembrandt’s Bible, a collection of biblical monologues, was recently published in the UK by Indigo Dreams. He writes regularly for Mosaic.

The question at the heart of this week’s double reading of Matot-Masey (Numbers 30:2 – 36:13) strikes at the heart of what the Torah as a whole is actually about. At the very beginning of Genesis, Rashi opens his magisterial commentary with this hypothesis:

Rabbi Yitzḥak said: The Torah didn’t need to start other than with “This month shall be [your first month]” (Exodus 12:1), which is the first commandment the Israelites were commanded. Why then does it begin with “In the beginning”? This is because it says in Psalms (111:6): “He declared the power of His works to His people in order to give to them the inheritance of nations.” Thus, should the nations of the world say to Israel, “You are robbers, for you have taken by force the lands of the Seven Nations [of Canaan],” they shall say to them: “All the earth belongs to God. He created it and gave it to whomever He saw fit. It was His will to give it to them and it was His will to take it from them and give it to us.”

Rashi’s hypothesis would make sense if the conquest of the land of Israel actually took place in the course of the first book of the Torah, or the second, or the third. But it does not take place in any of the five books of the Torah, whose narrative breaks off with the Israelites on the eastern side of the Jordan, leaving the messy business of conquest to the book of Joshua. And even that book, as my teacher Rabbi Hezi Cohen pointed out, contains fewer than 100 verses on the subject of warfare, being much more concerned with the problem of ethics and power once you’re in your own land.

As for the Torah as a whole, it’s concerned with much broader issues. Take, for example, the conversation in this week’s reading between Moses and the livestock-rich sons of Reuben and Gad:

But there were farm animals galore belonging to the sons of Reuben and sons of Gad,
A tremendous number and they saw the land of Etzar and the land of Gilad
And here the place was a place for grazing.
And the sons of Gad and sons of Reuben came
And spoke to Moses and Elazar the priest and the leaders of the community, saying:
“The country the Lord struck before the community of Israel is for livestock
And your servants have livestock.”
And they said, “If we’ve found favor in your eyes,
Let this land be given to your servants as an estate,
Don’t cross us over the Jordan.”

As the attentive reader will recall, this is not the first time in the Torah that livestock have figured at a critical juncture. Abraham and Lot discontinue their travel together because they have too many animals, and Lot, gazing at the rich pastureland in the cities of the plain, heads off in that direction. (To put it mildly, that didn’t turn out so well.) Later, Joseph’s brothers follow him down to Egypt to live in Goshen because of its rich pastureland. (And how did that turn out? A pattern is emerging here.) And now along come these livestock-happy fools. Have they learned nothing from the preceding books? Moses proceeds to slap them down:

But Moses told the sons of Gad and sons of Reuben: “Are your brothers coming to war
And you’ll settle here? Why do you stir the hearts of the children of Israel
From crossing over to the land the Lord gave them?”

So far, Moses seems to have no intention of letting them stay outside the land of Israel. Which must mean that Rashi’s right: the Torah isn’t a book of moral philosophy, it’s a real-estate prospectus. Or is it?

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But they went up to him and said, “We’ll build pens for our sheep here
And cities for our children.
And we’ll swiftly trailblaze ahead of the children of Israel
Until we bring them to their places
While our children settle in cities fortified against the dwellers in the land.
We won’t return to our homes until each son of Israel has inherited his inheritance.
But we won’t inherit with them over the Jordan and beyond,
For our inheritance will have come to us on the eastern bank of the Jordan.

And Moses said to them: “If you fulfill this speech,
If you trailblaze before the Lord to the war,
And every trailblazer of you crosses the Jordan before God
Until He lets you inherit His enemies before Him
And when the land is conquered before the Lord
And after that you return—then you’ll be clear of the Lord and of Israel
And this land will be yours as an estate before God.
But if you don’t do so,
Here you’ve sinned before God
And know that your sin will find you out.
Build yourselves cities for your children
And pens for your sheep,
And what comes out of your mouth, follow through.

It turns out, then, that the Torah is not about the land of Israel, it’s about morality—anywhere. When the sons of Gad and Reuben ask for the rich land outside of Israel, Moses reacts initially in his role as warlord, not as spiritual leader. But then these tribesmen—who were among the fiercest fighters at his command—take charge of the negotiations and assure him that they will see the campaign through. At that point, Moses switches modes. Rather than insisting that they plan for villas in the Negev, he becomes entirely practical about the realities of building your life outside the land of Israel. Notably, he also reverses the order of their plan of action: where they put building their property and sheep pens first, Moses instructs them first to build cities that can protect their children from the inhabitants of the surrounding land.

The issue is not really what land you’re living on, but how you live on it. That’s why the central actions of the Torah take place in pre-Jewish Canaan, Egypt, and Sinai. The laws of moral reality that govern Jewish life obtain everywhere, and Moses’ job is to pound them into the heads of the Israelites. As he prepares to delegate his duties to Joshua, he also prepares the sons of Gad and Reuben for a life without him, and for that purpose the central question becomes: how will you raise your children? If you want to raise them properly, put their welfare ahead of your livestock’s. They’re your principal herd, and if you’re no longer moving through the desert but proposing to settle down then you’d better make provisions for educating them and keeping them distinct, or—guess what?—they won’t be distinct for long.

But Moses appointed over them Elazar the priest and Joshua son of Nun
And the leaders of the tribes of the children of Israel
And Moses told them, “If the sons of Gad and sons of Reuben cross
With you over the Jordan, each a trailblazer to the war before the Lord,
And the land is conquered before you,
Then give them the land of Gilad as an estate.
But if they don’t cross as trailblazers with you
Then they’ll take hold among you in the land of Canaan.”

If the land of Israel were the only place the Torah envisaged as a possible Jewish habitation, things would have looked different. But at this crucial juncture, with some Jews opting to stay outside the land, Moses postulates a moral hierarchy. It is certainly possible to stay outside the land, but extra effort is required. Over and over again, Moses repeats the word offered by the sons of Gad: ḥalutsim, pioneers or, in my translation, trailblazers—the same word that in our era was adapted to describe the early Zionist pioneers who returned to the land to prepare the way for a mass immigration from Europe (which never came). But “pioneer” doesn’t cover the entire meaning. I’ve opted for “trailblazer” because of its moral connotations: if you want to stay outside the land of Israel, you don’t just have to blaze a trail ahead of the rest of the community while conquering the land, you have to be a perpetual trailblazer: you yourself have to be the force that insulates your children from becoming lost among the surrounding tribes. If you do not keep your word to God, that is the sin that will find you out. And if you aren’t capable of such trailblazing, better to accept the lesser moral challenge of scrabbling to take root in Canaan amid the other tribes.

Not that that’s such a simple challenge, either:

And the Lord spoke to Moses in the prairie of Moab, saying:
Speak to the children of Israel and tell them—
You’re crossing the Jordan to the land of Canaan
And you’ll disinherit all those settled in the land before you
And you’ll desecrate their mosaics, and all their graven images you’ll desecrate,
And all their platforms you’ll wipe out.
And you’ll dispossess the land and settle it
For to you I gave the land, to inherit it.

. . .

And if you don’t dispossess those settled in the land before you
Then whatever you leave of them
Shall be pokers in your eyes and burrs in your sides
And they’ll tie you in a knot over the land you’re settled in.
And then it shall be that what I thought to do to them, I’ll do to you.

The problem of living in and conquering the land of Israel is that it is not unoccupied; it has never been unoccupied. If the moral problem of living in it were simple, then Rashi’s scenario at the beginning of his Torah commentary would work fine: just show up on the other side of the Jordan, wave the first verse of Genesis at the first inhabitants you meet, and they’ll immediately start packing. But it isn’t like that. Even when Joshua conquers the land by force, armed with divine permission to conduct a kind of ethnic cleansing, all it takes is for the Gibeonites to pose as a distant tribe and sue for a treaty and the children of Israel strike a deal allowing them to become the “woodcutters and water carriers for the assembly.” Even with divine sanction, dispossession and a clear conscience do not go together.

The upshot is that the land of Israel is another morally lethal environment:

But don’t defile the land you’re in
For blood will defile the land
And the land won’t be expiated for the blood spilled on it
Except by the blood of whoever spilled it.
Don’t contaminate the land you dwell in
That I dwell within
For I the Lord dwell within the children of Israel.

Here finally is the answer to the question posed by Rashi and the question posed to Moses by the ranchers. Real estate matters, but not ultimately: wherever Jews live, God lives within them. If you live in the land of Israel, you have to take care not to desecrate that land because the blood you spill will come back to haunt you. If you don’t live in the land of Israel, God is still within you, and you’d best communicate that fact to your children—because, whether stationary or moving, a herd of farm animals or of children needs to be led; it doesn’t lead itself. And wherever God lives, there are consequences to actions. If you don’t keep your word, your sin will find you out.

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